The explosion of the “année terrible” crashed through all these countries, awoke every parliament, stupified every sovereign, and irritated every people. The world was disgusted by the nation which had fired off the sacrilegious cannon and let loose the scourge of war into the midst of a situation which was regarded as the Golden Age of universal peace. It was France that had troubled this beneficent peace. It was France that, without appreciable cause, had provoked the frightful struggle. So much the worse for her if she succumbed to what she had herself unchained without a thought for the general interests of Europe.
Such was the opinion, the “state of soul,” as they say nowadays, of Europe at the beginning of the war.
France was completely isolated, in the most distressing sense of the word; that is to say, she not only had not a single ally, but not a single sympathiser. All her neighbours, States, sovereigns, and people, even her oldest friends, had turned from her as from a criminal who had destroyed public happiness.
But when, after disasters without name and precedent in the glorious history of France, the brave population sprang up again under defeat like a steel blade, when after the war of regular armies there commenced a new war of a people which would not surrender, but insisted on remaining erect and fighting with the broken sword picked up on the battlefield of its conquered armies, which insisted on battling for the honour of life and the integrity of its sacred soil, then her most obstinate enemies admired and saluted a resistance unexampled in history, and contemplated with ever-growing interest the struggle of a scarcely-armed people against the best trained, best led, and most formidable armies which had ever invaded an enemy’s country. France, which had yesterday been found guilty of commencing the war, became in defeat the object of admiration and a living image of the civic virtues; Europe recovered from her irritation and began with an anxious eye to follow and to desire the end of an unequal duel.
We therefore had reason to hope that we might find in the great Powers, not only the sympathy with which everyone had been inspired by our resistance, but the firm desire to help us in our efforts at arriving at the conclusion of an honourable peace.
Certainly I could not, and did not, hope to succeed in drawing either England or Austria into a war against Prussia. I knew both countries too well to abandon myself to such an illusion. But what we hoped for with conviction, and what we had reason to hope for, was that the European Powers, in the general interests of the future, would arrive at an entente, and would associate themselves in an effort to obtain from Prussia terms of peace less harsh than those which the latter had proudly been announcing ever since the first days of her victories.
If Austria and England seriously desired this result, then Italy, that beautiful kingdom for whose unity France had poured out the best of her blood, could not withdraw from the union, and Russia, herself a powerful and precious friend of the old King of Prussia, would be happy to serve as mediator between the Powers thus united and Germany.
There was, in fact, reason to hope that the Powers would come to an understanding with the object of speaking the language of reason to Prussia and making her understand, with firmness and resolution, that all Europe was interested in seeing this war terminated by a lasting peace, whose conditions could be accepted without humiliation and without the arrière pensée that a contract, accepted by France against her will and under the force of necessity, might be torn up in time to come. Such were my sincere hopes.
What really happened disappointed these hopes. But that does not prove that we were wrong in conceiving and attempting the enterprise, and there will certainly come a day[A]—perhaps not far distant—when history will judge that European diplomacy then lost one of the most propitious occasions for laying the foundations of a pacifist policy and preparing the era of general disarmament. Already to-day this dream might be realised, to the profit and happiness of all humanity. For if France had not been mutilated, what obstacle would there now be to the general disarmament of Europe?
[A] Note:—M. Reitlinger’s volume was published in Paris in 1899.